A recent Gallup Poll showed widespread uncertainty about the
"progressive" political label, with the majority of those responding
(54%) saying they are unsure what "progressive" means. 31% felt they
knew enough about "Progressive" to say that it doesn't describe their
views, while 12% said that they were themselves progressive.

Looking
on the bright side, for those of us in that 12% minority of
self-described progressives, I'd say these results indicate an
opportunity for us to define "progressive" to mean what we think it
should mean, since most people don't seem to have any fixed ideas of
their own. And if we want "progressive" to be more than a stand-in for
"liberal", we should all give some thought to how "progressive" and
"liberal" differ - or how we'd like them to differ.

I know
exercises like this can seem divisive, and it's certainly not my
intention to set self-described liberals and progressives at one
another's throats, but there are real ideas at stake, and sometimes a
discussion that starts with labels can go much deeper.

Here an
attempt at clarification, made while looking forward to others thoughts
on the subject:

I think classical liberalism is based on the idea
of an accommodation, or balance, between state power and corporate
power. Under the liberal ideal, the vast bulk of the economy remains in
private hands, and the private economy is pretty much a "no-go" zone for
the ideas of democracy we take for granted in the political realm -
i.e., economic decisions are not made democratically, and there's no
expectation they should be - but this private economic power is held in
check by government power and the power of organized labor.

If
there was a golden age for this view, it was the 1950's and 1960's, when
even many labor leaders (but probably not many of labor's
rank-and-file) came to believe that a tacit agreement have been reached
with corporate elites, with generous union contracts tied to large
increases in worker productivity, in a "win-win" arrangement that
seemingly could go on forever.

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Of course, we all know what
happened then. Corporate power rose up, crushed the unions, and then
took control of our government. Today, there is no "accommodation", no
"balance", corporate power is in control, unions are virtually
powerless, and every government regulatory agency has been captured by
the industry it is intended to regulate, with the Minerals
Management Service being a prime example.

Modern
progressivism is built on an understanding of this state of affairs.
Recognizing that there can be no balance between corporate power and the
people's power - because corporate power will never tolerate a balance
and will always use every tool at its disposal to become ascendant -
progressivism seeks to attack corporate power directly, by attempting to
bring the economic sector under democratic control and by replacing
private ownership with public (or even worker) ownership. A liberal
would have no objection to maintaining the private, for-profit health
insurance industry, as long as there are strong government regulations
in place to control it, but a progressive, understanding that any
regulations will eventually be circumvented, corrupted and even
repealed, will demand that the entire health insurance function be taken
over by the state through a single-payer plan. Under the progressive
view, because corporate power can never be trusted or reined in, except
briefly, life or death decisions must be taken entirely out of corporate
hands and put in the peoples' hands.

You might argue, "That's
not progressivism, that's socialism!" And, as an avowed socialist, I'd
be hard-pressed to disagree with you. But the discussion I'm trying to
initiate here is as much aspirational as it is definitional. That is, we
should be talking as much about what we want "progressive" to mean as we do about what
progressive, at this point, actually means to anyone (especially since
it appears to mean not much at all to most people.)

Most of all,
we should avoid the simple-minded task of placing progressives and
liberals on a linear "political spectrum", with progressives a few
notches to the left of liberal ("They want a 20% cut in carbon emissions
by 2020, we want a 40% cut by 2015!") Instead, I'm arguing for a clean
break from liberalism because I believe it is a dying philosophy which
attempts to restore us to a time that can never be again (and maybe even
wasn't there in the first place.) If progressivism has a future, it
must be based on repudiating the liberal model and creating a movement
for a democratically-controlled economy that can rise up and defeat
corporate power, as decisively as corporate power has crushed all else
before it. Given the shifting
attitudes of our nation's youth, who have only known a world ruled
by corporations, there may even come a day when we can call this program
"socialism" and be done with it.

www.wnpj.org

Steve Burns is Program Director of Wisconsin Network of Peace a Justice, a coalition of more than 160 groups that work for peace, social justice and environmental sustainability.